


Nobody's Artist

by messofthejess



Category: Carry On Series - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: Bad Jokes, Banter, Coloring, Coloring Books, Drawing, Flirting, Fluff, Humor, I mean where is there not banter where Simon and Baz are involved, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 22:55:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29443704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/messofthejess/pseuds/messofthejess
Summary: Simon and Baz engage in a little casual art therapy.
Relationships: Tyrannus Basilton "Baz" Pitch & Simon Snow, Tyrannus Basilton "Baz" Pitch/Simon Snow
Comments: 7
Kudos: 64
Collections: Snowbaz Sweethearts Fic Exchange 2021





	Nobody's Artist

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flammable_grimm_pitch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flammable_grimm_pitch/gifts).



> For the Snowbaz Sweethearts Exchange, I was paired with flammable_grimm_pitch! I'm not quite sure if this was what you were expecting to receive, but I hope you like it just the same. 
> 
> Baz's drawing of Simon is based on a drawing done by subparselkie over on Tumblr. I took a little liberty with the description in this story. With love, of course.

**Simon**

The cashier behind the counter gives me an odd look as I duck out of the art supply shop, bag tucked under my arm. Probably because I managed to ring the bell above the door twice: once by actually opening the door, and once more when one of my wings catches the bell. Of course, _they_ don’t know it’s because of invisible wings. They probably just thought it was odd that a bloke in his twenties was out buying crayons.

I needed something to get me off the couch. Something that was productive without putting too much pressure on me to produce anything important. Low stakes. Baking is fine, but Pen and I can’t afford any fancy ingredients or pans like they have on _Bake Off_ , and our freezer only holds so many muffins. You can only clean a flat so many times before you make a mess just so you have something to tidy up again. (I went on a frenzy once, deep-cleaning the whole flat from end to end in two days. Knackered for two days afterwards.) Then I hit upon this.

“You don’t think it’s stupid?” I asked my therapist (I started seeing her again) in our session yesterday.

“Not at all!” Dr. Cole gave me her crinkly smile, the one that scrunches up her whole face. “Coloring has been shown to be very relaxing and therapeutic for people of all ages. I think you’d get a lot out of it.”

Hence my mad dash to the art supply store. I absolutely could have gone to Tesco for coloring books and spent far less money, but I’m always at Tesco. This way, it feels a bit more intentional. More special. Plus this way I’m not stuck with Peppa Pig or some other inane kid’s book. I’ve got _mandalas_ now, and a book full of tropical fish, and a tablet of blank paper for when I’m feeling particularly inspired to doodle. Proper adult coloring materials.

Penny is still in class when I get back to the flat, so I dump everything out on the table and put the kettle on, then going back to kick off my shoes by the front door and shrug off my jacket. The whole time while I wait for the water to boil, I’m buzzing. I’ve been feeling better lately (the therapy, I suspect), and right now I’m as excited as I’ve been in a long time. (I’d say I was excited in America, at least in the beginning, but looking back, I was hardly alive during that trip. Everything happened so much, and so fast. I didn’t live so much as blunder through the mess.) Should I be this excited to tuck in and color? Maybe not. But who’s here to judge?

I pour myself a cup of tea into my _Handsome Devil_ mug—Baz’s idea of a gag gift, complete with a handle shaped like my spade-tipped tail—and sit down at the table. The massive box of 64 crayons calls to me, every one of them waiting to be picked and pressed to a page. (I could have gone for the box of 120, but that seemed like too much.) After staring at the box for a solid minute, I shrug and tip the whole box out on the table, crayons rolling out every which direction. One of them lands in my lap, a soft gray crayon. Timberwolf. Seems like my first color was picked for me.

I’m halfway through coloring the inside ring of a mandala when my mobile chimes with a little snippet of violin music. A moment later, the door to the flat opens, sweeping in a gust of cold and a muttering vampire.

“You don’t have to text, you know. Door’s always open,” I call.

Two freezing arms clad in an unbearably posh black wool coat drape over my shoulders. “It’s called courtesy, love,” Baz breathes right next to my ear before pressing a kiss to the outer shell. “Being a gentleman.”

“Giving a fair warning, more like.”

“Nightmare.” Another kiss to the ear. “What’s all this?”

“Art therapy. Sort of.”

Baz unwraps himself from around my shoulders and heads back through the kitchen, stopping to lift the kettle and shake it to check for water. (Ridiculous, honestly. As if I never leave enough water for his tea.) “Your therapist recommended you get coloring books?”

A few years ago, that would have been a barbed question. Now I know that he’s asking out of genuine concern. Despite my best efforts, I still haven’t convinced him to go to therapy, but he likes to check in on how I’m doing with mine. No prying, though. He never pries.

“Was my idea, actually. Got tired of becoming one with the sofa. Figured I need an outlet.”

“Look at you with your healthy coping mechanism.” Baz circles back around the table, his _Bite Me_ mug—printed with fangs, _my_ idea of a gag gift—in one hand. He’s wearing that thick deep green jumper Pen bought him for Christmas, the one that’s so dark it’s almost black. Eight years of school uniforms, and I somehow never noticed how good he looks in green.

“Never really got to color a lot when I was in the homes,” I mutter, dropping the timberwolf crayon and grabbing the magenta one. “There were hardly ever enough crayons or paper to go round, and someone always had the color someone else wanted, so there’d be fights.”

“I can imagine,” Baz murmurs overs his mug of tea before taking a sip.

“Did you ever color when you were a kid?”

“I was more of a musical child. When I was old enough to hold onto a violin and bow, that’s what I used to express myself.”

I nod, mostly because I can’t think of anything else to say in response. Maybe coloring was considered too lowbrow for any Old Family children to do. The indigo is starting to bore me, so I reach around for the goldenrod crayon, only to look up and see Baz twirling it between his absurdly long fingers.

“This is almost the same color as your hair,” he says, glancing up at me. “Little too blond though. Burnt sienna and this would be right, I think.”

“Prove it.”

“Hmm?”

“I bought blank paper.” I slide the canvas shopping tote across the table. “Draw me and show me that’s right.”

Baz blinks slowly, like a cat. “You really don’t want to see that.”

“But I really do. I bet you used to draw me all the time. You had to have drawn out _some_ of your nefarious plots on paper.”

“I’m not dignifying that with a response.” He reaches over, tugs the drawing tablet out of the tote, and flips it open. With a quiet huff, he tilts the tablet up so I can’t see it and starts drawing with the goldenrod, his hand swirling in large curves.

I shrug and go back to hunting for something close enough to goldenrod, eventually settling on dandelion. We fall into comfortable silence, save for the occasional clunk when one of us sets down our mugs or the shuffle when we both reach for the same crayon (happens more than once). It reminds me of our Watford days doing reading and essays in our room, minus the seething resentment that bled between us.

“Done,” Baz declares after a few minutes. He has a stash of crayons piled up in front of him: forest green, violet, pink, a couple shades of brown. The goldenrod is worn down to a nub. That combined with his smirk—the one that tells me he’s about to do something wicked—has me concerned.

“’S not a competition,” I remind him. “I’m coloring, you’re drawing. Two different things.”

“Still.” Baz turns the tablet around to face me. “I think it’s time we submitted a new work to the Louvre.”

“What the h—is that _me_?”

“You joked about me drawing out my nefarious plots, so I drew you plotting about me plotting.”

I stare at the drawing. The figure that’s supposed to be me has a towering stack of bronze curls and a face splotched with mud. In fact, all of me is covered with mud. I’m in my Watford uniform, gesturing behind me at a web of crisscrossing red and blue lines, my mouth agape and frowning. My eyebrows are two angry black lines cut sharp over the blue dots of my eyes.

“Why do I have no fingers?” I ask.

“Artist license. Also hands are absurdly hard to draw.”

“I look like a gingerbread man!”

“Marshmallow.”

“Whatever!” I throw my hands up. “You made me look deranged!”

“On the contrary, I made you look rather passionate. You always did get flustered when you thought I was up to something. Somewhat like how you are now.” Baz leans on his hand, trying to hide a grin. One of his fangs pokes out over his bottom lip, like they always do when he smiles hard. Wicked and endearing.

“I—mmph!” I ignore him and search around the table blindly for another crayon. Don’t care what color, so long as I don’t have to look at Baz to find it.

“If it bothers you so much, I’ll make it disappear.” I hear a tearing noise and a familiar _fwoom_ across the table, and I look up to see Baz holding a fire in his palm underneath the drawing.

“No! Christ. Just a silly drawing, anyway.”

“Simon…”

“Keep it!”

“Use your words,” Baz says gently. That phrase taken on a whole new meaning these days, especially since I restarted therapy. I’m starting to think it was one of the few things Baz would say to me back when we were at each other’s throats that he never meant to be sarcastic. You never get anywhere, and you never get what you want, if you don’t say what you mean.

I breathe before I answer. In through the nose, out through the mouth. “That’s not who I am anymore. And even if it was, I definitely didn’t use any corkboards with yarn and thumbtacks everywhere. I wasn’t _that_ kind of obsessed with you. So it kind of…hurts that you see me like that.”

Baz is quiet for a moment, then slides the tablet across the table to me. “Here. Draw me now.”

“What?”

“Turnabout is fair play. I made you look ridiculous, now it’s your turn.”

“I can’t—” My ears feel like they’re going to burn off my head. “I don’t—there’s no way I can draw you.”

“I didn’t say it had to be done _well_. That’s rather the point.”

Shit. He’s got me there. Without hesitation, I grab the tablet and the black crayon and start drawing the wave of hair that falls over Baz’s forehead. Next come the eyes, two timberwolf gray half-circles in his face. Tan for his face shaded over with periwinkle. Wild strawberry for his shirt.

“Can I have the silver, please?” I ask, stretching my hand out.

Baz raises an eyebrow at me and drops the silver crayon in my hand wordlessly.

“Sparkles.”

The confusion on Baz’s face turns to deep annoyance as he glares at me over his mug of tea. I’ve seen him shirtless enough times to know he doesn’t turn into a disco ball in the sunlight, but that’s not going to stop me. Artistic license and all that.

I make Baz wait far more than I need to, until he’s practically ready to leap at me, before I turn the tablet around to show him.

“I have brown squiggles emanating from me, Snow. Did I just get back from the loo?”

“It’s your cedar and bergamot aftershave! Except I don’t know what bergamot is, but I know cedar is brown, so—”

“My hair is sparkling.”

“Because you’ve just put that pomade stuff in it that makes it go flat and shiny.”

Baz nods. “Fair. My fangs aren’t quite _that_ long, though. You’ve made me look a bit like a saber-toothed tiger.”

“I’ve felt them when we kiss, Baz. They’re longer than you think.”

“Oh?” I’m greeted with a broad flash of teeth that might be read as feral by anyone who didn’t know Baz half as well as I do. “Perhaps you need a reminder.”

“Maybe I do.”

In a flash, Baz is half-straddling my chair, looming above me. I take the bait and reach up to kiss him softly, his fangs pressing between our lips. Baz hums and tugs his fingers through my hair.

“Now, can you draw me like one of your French girls?” he murmurs in the tiny gap between us.

“I can draw you like an English twat.”

“Fuck off.” Baz dips down and kisses the mole on my chin, one of his favorite spots. “I could draw constellations between all your moles with permanent marker, you menace.”

I reach down very slowly between us and make a show of toying with the hem of my jumper like I’m about to pull it up over my head. Baz’s eyes follow my hands the whole time.

“Show me,” I whisper, and I lean up to kiss his cheek. 

Baz goes scrambling for the kitchen, muttering something about the disorganized state of the junk drawer. It’s all I can do not to fall down laughing. 

**Author's Note:**

> You can come find me on Tumblr at messofthejess. I'm trying (very slowly) to get back into writing again.


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